How WIRED Designed the Ultimate Smartwatch

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WIRED hired Branch to design a smartwatch for our January 2014 cover. The watch is meant to have apps on it that scroll up and down, like the wheel from Wheel of FortunePrice is Right. Photo: Todd Tankersley

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The goal was to create a device gorgeous enough that it would become a fashion statement—rather than a simple piece of technology. Photo: Todd Tankersley.

One critical decision involved getting the dimensions right, so that the width of the band was neither too feminine nor too masculine. Likewise, the display itself had to be large enough for up-and-down and side-to-side swipes. Photo: Branch

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A sample of the various materials that Branch tried out. Photo: Branch

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The challenge of design a band was tough. Branch eventually proposed that the band attach to the back of the screen, via a screw-on plate that would allow you to replace the band and let the screen "float" a bit. Photo: Todd Tankersley

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One big idea was to have the glasses work in concert with the watch. Photo: Todd Tankersley

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But unlike Google Glass, the display is meant to simply be a notification layer which only surfaces pertinent or pressing information. Photo: Todd Tankersley

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Sketches of the watch during development. Here, you can see an early attempt at figuring out how the band would link up with the watch. That turned out to be a difficult task, since any band linkages would impinge on the screen. Photo: Branch

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Photo: Branch

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Photo: Branch

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One detail that you can't see in the actual product renderings: The idea was to make the display look as if it's receding into the space of the screen, thus emphasizing the imaginary wheel that the apps revolve around. Photo: Branch

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Photo: Todd Tankersley

There’s something fishy about the cover of our January issue: We fronted a big story about wearable tech, but you’ve never seen the smartwatch and glasses on the cover. That’s because they’re concepts that we commissioned just for the issue.

In doing so, we wanted to explore a few big questions hanging over the development of wearable devices: For one, should a smartwatch really be, basically, a phone on your wrist? Is there any reason we’d actually want smart glasses? What should an internet-connected device on your wrist and face look like?

In a scant few years we’ll have processors small enough, and batteries strong enough to make wearable devices that we can only dream about. So what should we dream about?

To lead this charge into a brave new world, we tapped Branch, a new product-design company founded by Nick Cronan and Josh Morenstein, who previously held senior creative roles at Fuseproject. Their design is both beautiful and thoughtful. But behind the pretty gloss, there are big ideas about fashion, technology, and user experience. “Technology is a flash in the pan,” says Cronan. “But it becomes the norm when you can integrate it into what already exists.”

What Tech Companies Don’t Get About Fashion

The watch and glasses are meant to be fashionable enough that the technology is a bonus rather than the big sell. That’s important. If we’re ever going to want to wear computers on our bodies, they’ll have to be stylish enough that we’d wear them even if they weren’t computers.

That, as my colleague Bill Wasik points out in his essay, is the key thing about fashion that tech companies fail to understand. It’s the difference between glasses so cool you want them even if you don’t have bad eyesight and, well, Google Glass, which you couldn’t pay most people to wear.

Seeing the world of wearable computers through this lens leads you down a path of decisions, which Cronan and Morenstein explored in the UI.

Perhaps the biggest insight is that the glasses and watch should be in a dialogue, rather than standalone devices. And if they’re networked together, they shouldn’t duplicate each other’s functionality. Instead, one should complement the other. In this case, the watch is the interaction device. The glasses are just a secondary display.

The Watch’s Secret Sauce: Lightweight Interactions

Watches, over the course of hundreds of years, have acclimated us to having information on our wrists. It’s natural to touch one hand to the other.

But one great failing of existing smartwatches such as the Samsung Galaxy is that they’re simply miniaturized cell phones. The same swipes that are intuitive on a smartphone are hopeless on a watch-sized screen. It’s too hard to aim for a tiny icon with your fat finger. They require far too much care.

The interface on the WIRED watch is far simpler. Your function/app icons are arranged in an infinite carousel, something like the Wheel of Fortune Price is Right wheel. You swipe up and down to flip through them. To engage any one of them, you swipe to the side. The icons themselves could even be arranged by importance, or ordered automatically according to urgency of inputs required.

The smartwatch would have a rotating carousel of apps that you could scroll through, up or down. Photo: Todd Tankersley

Getting the Industrial Design Just Right

Back to the fashion aspect. Perhaps one of the smartest features of the design is its dimensions, which Branch agonized over. We asked for a watch that would be unisex, but a watch that’s too wide feels odd for a woman; too thin, and a man would never wear it.

Branch finally found a happy medium that works on a male and female wrist. And lo and behold, that width happened to coincide quite nicely with the existing dimensions of Apple’s app fonts.

But making something this thin caused a series of chain reactions: For one, the display had to grow longer, so it therefore had to curve around the wrist. (Those dimensions then influenced what made sense in the watch UI.) To keep it thin enough to still feel like a watch—instead of a miniature phone—Branch had to refine the band.

Instead of lugs at either end, the solution was a band that fastens to the watch via a removable plate on the back of the watch. That serves multiple purposes: Since the plate keeps the watch from sitting directly on the skin, the watch face itself “floats” a bit, allowing it to fit many wrists despite its curvature. Meanwhile, the watch face itself can remain optimized for visibility without the band interfering.

The Glasses: Keep it Simple, Stupid

Now on to the glasses. Instead of acting like Google Glass, the idea was that they’d be a very quiet display layer for high-level information. Branch though about the display being as simple as a indicator dot: Something reassuring you that there’s nothing too important going on in your feeds, but smart enough, when the time is right, to say, “Hey, you might want to get back to the office right now because stuff is really blowing up.”

The glasses are meant to serve only a simple notification layer, tied to your watch or phone. Photo: Todd Tankersley

To that end, the “device” wasn’t really a device at all, but rather a simple copper clip Branch affixed to a pre-existed pair of glasses by the fashion label 3.1 Phillip Lim. The real work went into figuring out what a smart interaction model would be for an information display on the glasses.

The big idea was that the glasses would allow you to separate yourself from your phone and computer.

“The holy grail is not having to pull your phone out,” says Cronan. To that end, the display on the glasses exists on the bottom third of the lens. Just like a bifocal, you don’t have to look through the display all the time. You can subtly check in, and reassure yourself that there’s nothing too pressing that demands your attention. Why do they need to do much more?

The glasses absolutely do not have a direct interface layer. Touching something on your face is an annoying reminder to people around you that you’re not paying attention. Moreover, as Morenstein points out, glasses only work because they’ve been optimized to sit on your face unmolested. Touching them unbalances them and gets them dirty. It defeats the very point of their design.

The watch, however, is meant for taps and swipes. “We’ve moved the tactility to somewhere that’s not distracting,” says Morenstein. “We’ve moved it to a context where you need it.”

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In the last 20 years of personal computing, we’ve readily given up one paradigm for another: Desktops gave way to laptops; laptops gave way to tablets and smartphones. In that unrelenting march of progress, we often fail to realize that it’s not normal at all.

The very fact that computers we store in our pockets or on our desks haven’t been around that long that they’re so frequently prone to change. The behaviors that have built up around them turn out not to be so deeply embedded in our minds. We readily change them when something a little bit better comes along.

Wearables are different. “The things you put on your face and body have a much longer history,” points out Morenstein. “They’re far more closely tied to personal identification.” Thus, when you ask someone to put a computer on their face or wrist, you’re asking them to overturn and rethink a history stretching back literally hundreds of years.

Wearables that aren’t designed with those constraints in mind are doomed to fail. And that was the starting point for the design that Branch created for WIRED. As Morenstein put it, “You have to find the in-between space without reinventing how people look and how they interact.”